Related papers: Double spend races
Extensive research on Nakamoto-style consensus protocols has shown that network delays degrade the security of these protocols. Established results indicate that, perhaps surprisingly, maximal security is achieved when the network is as…
For Nakamoto's longest-chain consensus protocol, whose proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) variants power major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Cardano, we revisit the classic problem of the security-performance tradeoff: Given a…
Researchers have discovered a series of theoretical attacks against Bitcoin's Nakamoto consensus; the most damaging ones are selfish mining, double-spending, and consistency delay attacks. These attacks have one common cause: block…
In this paper, we explore vulnerabilities and countermeasures of the recently proposed blockchain consensus based on proof-of-authority. The proof-of-work blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, have been shown both theoretically and…
The Lightning Network, a payment channel network with a market cap of over 192M USD, is designed to resolve Bitcoin's scalability issues through fast off-chain transactions. There are multiple Lightning Network client implementations, all…
Inspired by the double-debt problem in Japan where the mortgagor has to pay the remaining loan even if their house was destroyed by a catastrophic event, we model the lender's cash flow, by an exponential functional of a renewal-reward…
We calculate the probability of success of block-hiding mining strategies in Bitcoin-like networks. These strategies involve building a secret branch of the block-tree and publishing it opportunistically, aiming to replace the top of the…
We study the probability that one beta-distributed random variable exceeds the maximum of two others, allowing all three to have general parameters. This amounts to studying Euler transforms of products of two incomplete beta functions. We…
A trading system is said to be {robust} if it generates a robust return regardless of market direction. To this end, a consistently positive expected trading gain is often used as a robustness metric for a trading system. In this paper, we…
We study a random process over graphs inspired by the way payments are executed in the Lightning Network, the main layer-two solution on top of Bitcoin. We first prove almost tight upper and lower bounds on the time it takes for a payment…
We investigate the time to consensus in Nakamoto blockchains. Specifically, we consider two competing growth processes, labeled \emph{honest} and \emph{adversarial}, and determine the time after which the honest process permananetly exceeds…
In a Proof-of-Work blockchain such as Bitcoin mining hashrate is increasing in the block reward. An increase in hashrate reduces network vulnerability to attack (a reduction in security cost) while increasing carbon emissions and…
This study examines the weak form of the efficient market hypothesis for Bitcoin using a feedforward neural network. Due to the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies in recent years, the question has arisen, as to whether market…
Bitcoin derives a verifiable temporal order from probabilistic block discovery and cumulative proof-of-work rather than from a trusted global clock. We show that block arrivals exhibit stable exponential behavior across difficulty epochs,…
Bitcoin is currently subject to a significant pay-for-speed trade-off. This is caused by lengthy and highly variable transaction confirmation times, especially during times of congestion. Users can reduce their transaction confirmation…
Numerous blockchain applications are designed with tasks that naturally have finite durations, and hence, a double-spending attack (DSA) on such blockchain applications leans towards being conducted within a finite timeframe, specifically…
A widespread security claim of the Bitcoin system, presented in the original Bitcoin white-paper, states that the security of the system is guaranteed as long as there is no attacker in possession of half or more of the total computational…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
The computation of two Bayesian predictive distributions which are discrete mixtures of incomplete beta functions is considered. The number of iterations can easily become large for these distributions and thus, the accuracy of the result…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Based on the Nakamoto consensus, Bagaria, Kannan, Tse, Fanti, and Viswanath proposed the Prism protocol in 2018 and showed that it achieves near-optimal blockchain…